


Humbug!: X-Files, "How the Ghosts Stole Christmas"

by PlaidAdder



Series: X-Files Meta [12]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Critique, F/M, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction, how the ghosts stole christmas, mulder/scully romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-14
Updated: 2014-07-14
Packaged: 2018-02-08 20:47:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1955613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which, while talking about what this episode suggests about the darker side of the Mulder/Scully partnership, I cannot stop myself from going on a few little rants, chiefly about the persistent depiction of the single life as a lonely and empty wasteland full of isolation and despair.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Humbug!: X-Files, "How the Ghosts Stole Christmas"

 

Ah, “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas.” Some showrunners would have said that making an X-Files Christmas episode was not only a terrible idea but an impossible task. But not Chris Carter. And after all, Charles Dickens did pretty well for himself with a Christmas ghost story back in the day. Tim Burton had more recently pulled off a scaricomical fusion of horror and holly in  _The Nightmare Before Christmas_. Could not I, Chris Carter must have thought to himself, do the same?

The results were, if nothing else, endearing. Along with “The Postmodern Prometheus” and “Triangle,” this is one of those meta-episodes where, because the events depicted are not fully real, CC feels safe pushing the Mulder/Scully partnership closer to romance. The ghosts are so curmudgeonly that they become cute; and who would want to give up the gift exchange in Mulder’s apartment, where—for the first time in the history of the show—we see the real Mulder and the real Scully voluntarily hanging out together for purposes not entirely work-related? It’s so heartwarming, and such a well-deserved moment of happiness for both characters, such as we’ve all wanted for them whether we ship them or not. So who could be mad at “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas”? Even me, even on rewatch…could I, would I,  _dare_ I open up a can of Scrooge on every X-Phile’s favorite Christmas carol?

I don’t know. Let’s find out!

So, on Christmas Eve, Mulder asks Scully to meet him in the driveway of an old abandoned Victorian manse. Even though it’s December 24, it’s the middle of a thunderstorm. Scully is annoyed and mentions that she has a lot of Christmas stuff to do. Mulder eventually admits that, as she puts it, he called her out on Christmas Eve “to go ghostbusting” with him. Once upon a time the house belonged to the brooding Maurice and the ethereally beautiful Lyda, who on Christmas 1917 entered into a “lovers’ pact,” killing themselves so they could be together forever and never spend Christmas apart. Their ghosts are supposed to haunt the house, with unfortunate results for its later occupants; Mulder mentions later that there have been three double murders in that house and all of them took place on Christmas Eve. Scully says she’s going home. Mulder goes on up the hill alone; but Scully discovers that she’s lost her car keys, so she goes into the house to find him. Once they’re in, all kinds of creepy stuff starts happening; they are inevitably separated, and then the ghosts show up and start fucking with them. It becomes clear that the ghosts spend every Christmas Eve trying to manipulate a couple into committing murder-suicide, and this year they’ve got their eye on Mulder and Scully. After trying to get each partner to believe that the other is gunning for them, the ghosts mind-control Scully into believing that Mulder has shot her, while mind-controlling Mulder into believing that Scully has shot him. Both of them are slithering down the entrance hallway toward the door, leaving trails of blood behind them, when an argument about who shot who first snaps Mulder back to reality. He gets up, realizes that he’s not shot after all, and helps Scully break the illusion. They both get the hell out of the house and out of Dodge. The ghosts, philosophically accepting their loss—“we almost had those two,” Lyda sighs—disappear into the ether for another year. Later that night, Mulder is watching  _A Christmas Carol_ alone on his couch and looking very pathetic when Scully turns up at his doorstep. They have a brief but meaningful little convo and then Mulder busts out a Christmas ‘present’ (more on that later). Scully has brought one for him too. They are opening their presents gleefully on the couch as the credits roll.

In the spirit of the season (look, it’s Christmas in July!) I will hand out the presents and candy first. The conversation in the car before Mulder heads into the house is classic. Scully, after listing all the haunted-house cliches she has noticed at this setting so far, says, “Hark! Is that a hound I hear baying on the moor?”, after which Mulder characteristically lowers the tone with, “No, that was a left cheek sneak.” They get into the house and it’s still good, with Scully rattling off all the reasons why she doesn’t believe in ghosts and all the reasons why other people do as it becomes ever clearer that they have entered the Twilight Zone. This part of it I love. “All right, I’m afraid,” Scully says, “but it’s an irrational fear.” And in fact this is how most of us feel when we’re watching a horror movie or walking past a graveyard at night or whatever: we know none of this shit is real or dangerous, and yet we can’t control our sensations. 

As far as horror-type scaring goes, the high point is the moment at which they see a loose floorboard and start prying it up. They discover a pair of corpses under the boards; and slowly, and creepily, they come to the realization that they are looking at their own dead and decomposing bodies, lying side by side, apparently shot to death. They look up; they look at each other; they run for it. 

Up to that point, it’s all good. But they can’t get out of the room; and after Mulder and Scully get separated trying, things kind of go to the dogs.

I’ve talked before about how much of  _The X-Files_ I see in Moffat-era  _Doctor Who._ Although there are things about how the building behaves that remind me a lot (in a backwards way) of “The God Complex,” the episode it most strongly recalled to mind was “Amy’s Choice,” in which the Doctor is constantly tormented by a wizened little pain in the ass who calls himself “the Dream Lord” and is always berating the Doctor about what a pathetic fucking heap of sad he is. (“Amy’s Choice” was written by Simon Nye and not by Moffat; but since Nye once wrote an episode of  _The Savages_ titled “The Ex Files” I think it’s fair to say he was familiar with the show.)  Like “Small Potatoes,” this episode uses an uglier but more powerful male figure to beat up on Mulder for being a waste of skin—and such good-looking skin, too. Like the Dream Lord, who is eventually revealed to be a projection of the Doctor’s own consciousness, Maurice (played with relish by Ed Asner) knows what the mean voices in Mulder’s head have been telling him all his life: that he’s a “self-righteous,” “narcissistic,” obsessive lunatic, hated by everyone except Scully—and even she only sticks with him because he resorts to desperate subterfuges like stealing her car keys. I didn't like it in "Amy's Choice" and I don't like it here, and it's for the same reason: despite the fact that some of these criticisms about the male hero being self-righteous, narcissistic, obsessive, a fuck-up, etc., are quite well-founded, they're not really meant to be taken seriously. They're always articulated by someone unsympathetic and often also unlovely (in TV there's a lot of overlap), and in the short term it just makes you feel bad for the hero.  In the long run, the hero is allowed to demonstrate his personal awesomeness and thereby invalidate the critique. It's ultimately a way of protecting the hero from criticism, and it's often a sign that the hero is, well, a little too close to his creators--something which is certainly true for both Chris Carter/Mulder and Steven Moffat/Twelve. But it is true that Scully comes in for some of this kind of abuse from Lyda, who taunts her for having such a “small life” that “her only joy in life is proving him wrong.” Both Maurice and Lyda, by the way, ship it hard. “We’re not lovers,” Mulder finally tells Lyda. “And this isn’t an exact science,” she replies. “But you’re both  _so_ attractive. And you’ll have plenty of time to work all that out.”

Apart from the fact that Scully is presented as being so rattled by these cheap horror effects that she becomes a shaking, hysterical mess as soon as Lyda appears (and then faints after she and Maurice reveal their ghostiness), there are basically two things I object to about the ghost part of this episode. The first is the awkwardness produced by Carter’s attempt to marry a deliberately kitschy/campy treatment of the ghosts themselves to a plot which is actually quite dark and raises legitimate and disturbing questions about the Great Mulder/Scully Partnership. As I pointed out in[ an earlier post](http://plaidadder.tumblr.com/post/91608664209/plaidder-rewatches-how-the-ghosts-stole), Mulder and Scully have actually come pretty close to murder, suicide, and murder-suicide at several points over the course of the show. So far, there are three episodes where Scully pulls a gun on Mulder (and one in which she deliberately shoots him), three episodes in which Mulder comes within a whisker of shooting Scully dead, one in which Mulder puts a gun to his head and pulls the trigger, one in which we are led to believe (by an apparently grieving Scully) that Mulder has killed himself, and one in which Mulder (as he believes) watches Scully blow her own brains out. There are plot reasons every time, of course; but eventually you do start to wonder what all this says about the submerged currents in that relationship. Both ghosts insinuate that Mulder may have actually lured Scully up to this house for the purpose of finally executing this often-rehearsed Liebestod. That is, of course, a naked attempt at mindfuckery; but it’s also the strongest explanation the episode ever provides for why Mulder drags Scully out there on Christmas Eve in the first place.

Before the ghosts show up, we can assume that Mulder is just wangling her into going on an unacknowledged date with him, hoping—like all the guys who take their girlfriends to amusement parks and horror flicks—that once her reptile-brain sensations are excited, she might start to think it’s him that’s making her heart beat faster. (This is a thing; it is called “misattribution of arousal,” and it is one of the few things I retained from Introduction to Psychology.) She seems not entirely averse to that idea—she tells him, in fact, that she might well be up for it if it weren’t actually Christmas Eve—and up until they get separated, they’re working pretty well as a team. But let's go below surface intentions for a moment. Mulder wants to go ghostbusting with Scully. OK. Why choose a pair of ghosts with this particular story? Or, to stay meta with this, why does Chris Carter create this situation and put them in it? What does this episode tell us, maybe, about why—despite the fact that he keeps writing episodes that allow him to fantasize about it—Carter’s still not letting this relationship progress into romance? Could it be that it’s because, if this relationship became a romance, there are certain things about Mulder’s personality, and the post-Season-4 relationship dynamics, that might start to bother everyone a lot more than they do now?

The image up at the top there is of Scully’s reaction to what she believes is the gunshot with which “Mulder” just killed her. Knowing their history—knowing how many times they have replayed similar scenes together—you figure part of that shock is her heart breaking as she discovers that (as she thinks) she was wrong about him all along. Mulder really  _was_ as fucked up as everyone thought he was. Her family always  _was_  right about what a terrible influence he was on her. She should have listened to all those people—she should have listened to herself—when they warned her that she was letting him take over and destroy what had once been a relatively normal and reasonably happy life. Like so many women who get involved with volatile and troubled men, she's ignored all the red flags, telling herself that no matter how crazy he seems _she_ can trust him because  _she_ is the only one who really understands him. And now, she's thinking that all those times when she looked down the barrel of his gun and told him this isn’t you, you’re not yourself, you don’t really want to hurt me—she was always wrong. This was always what was in him. This was always what, if she didn’t get out of the relationship, he was eventually going to do to her.

Now that is some scary shit. And even though this show’s sense of humor about itself and its protagonists is one of its strengths, to me this whole thing sits very uncomfortably with the bickering-old-married-couple shtick the ghosts have going on. Maurice himself calls the “pop psychology” that the ghosts use to manipulate their victims “crap,” and it is true that the writing for that part of the episode is pretty bad. Carter uses both ghosts to voice his own Freudian analysis of his own characters, and you can smell the authorial intrusion; their psychobabble is as stilted as those Godawful opening-credits voiceovers. But otherwise, you have two cranky old grandparents pottering around in their bathrobes, cheerfully carrying out a “Christmas tradition” which is entirely psychotic. Carter tries to squeeze some oversexed-hag humor out of Lyda—“I don’t show my hole to just anybody,” she says, opening her robe to flash her abdominal wound to a visibly disgusted Mulder—which doesn’t help anyone. But the main joke is just that instead of a tragic pair of hot “star-crossed lovers,” they’re as disillusioned and miserable (yet affectionate, underneath it all) in the afterlife as they would have been on earth if they’d allowed themselves to grow old together. Their banality is funny for a little while; but as the psychodrama ratchets up it gets hard to accept the idea that two such endearing old coots would really have this sadistic desire to torment younger versions of themselves.

I could go on; but let me not forget the second thing that bugs the shit out of me, which is the whole “unbearable loneliness” theme. The only reason the ghosts have a shot at this, the episode implies, is that Mulder and Scully are both lonely people, clinging desperately to each other because it partially saves them from the emptiness of their own lives; separate them from each other and they both implode from the weight of all the crushing loneliness. Mulder’s loneliness makes him pathetic in his own right; Scully’s own loneliness is made more pathetic by her investment in this loser Mulder. And yet at the same time they are both judged to be lonely and pathetic in part  _because_  they refuse to date each other. In other words, all this soul-crushing life-destroying murder-suicide-inciting loneliness derives from the fact that instead of being a couple, both Mulder and Scully perversely insist on remaining single.

Yeah, I know, I ship it too. And yet, it is really time that someone finally stood up and asked the question: WHAT is so horrible about being single?

Much of what bugs me about Scully’s characterization and her treatment by other people comes back to what I believe is Chris Carter’s personal version of ’90s paranoia about single women postponing marriage and childbearing in order to focus on their careers. Scully attends a children’s birthday party in Season One—in “Jersey Devil,” I believe—at which her friend hassles her about why she’s not thinking about dating/marrying/starting a family. Her postponed fertility is brought up during “Home,” a nightmarish stew of rural stereotypes and reproductive anxiety which ends with Mulder observing that time has caught up with the incestuous self-replicating mutant family—just as it will one day catch up on Scully and her biological clock. In “A Christmas Carol” Scully has to sit there and listen to her asshole brother’s pregnant wife talk about how her life just wasn’t fulfilled until she got pregnant. Scully wants children, but because of her work, she can’t have them—at least not in the ‘natural’ way. Her abduction, during which all her ova are extracted, forces her into the murky world of assisted reproduction—familiar territory to us now, but still evidently the stuff of nightmares in the 1990s. Scully points out in “A Christmas Carol,” when her brother shows her a picture of an obviously non-pregnant Melissa, that women no longer have to be pregnant or indeed have sex with a man to have children—as they hammer home in “Emily,” where Scully is persistently paralleled with the Virgin Mary. All the floating green-blooded fetuses and comatose elderly pregnant women...the whole show is just steaming with fear of this brave new reproductive world.

But I digress. My point was: Yeah, Scully works hard, and she’s single, and she has no children, and she’s over 25. This is a tragedy? This makes her life so empty that she can be credibly drawn into a murder-suicide pact? This makes her so lonely that her only hope for fulfillment is an office romance? Why does her dedication to her job—of which her thing for Mulder is a part—have to make her pathetic and lonely? Isn’t it possible that her friendship with Mulder is actually emotionally rewarding in and of itself, instead of a pathetic substitute for the REAL emotional fulfillment which is available to women only through sex with a man? Could she not perhaps derive satisfaction from things outside work? Books? Music? Knowledge? Food? And I would ask a similar string of outraged questions on Mulder’s behalf, except that his own lonely loserdom is always put in terms of his not getting laid rather than his not being married with children. Why does being ‘alone’—by which everyone means that Mulder and Scully are not ‘together’—have to be a ticket to suicidal/homicidal loneliness?

That was a pretty big lump of coal there, Tex. I’m sorry. Let me see if I can find an orange for you down at the bottom of this stocking.

Grotesque as it sounds, I think the best part of this episode is that bloody slither toward the doorway. Even though (they believe) that both of them are bleeding copiously, both are suffering organ failure, and both are goners, they’re  _still_ trying to escape. Now that’s the badass Mulder and Scully we know and love. And at what they believe is the threshold of death, they do finally exchange something at least as intimate as sex. “Are you afraid?” he asks her, after she realizes she’s dying. “I am,” she says. “I am, too,” he answers. Before the old Mulder/Scully banter revives them both, we get this moment where all defenses are down and they both confront the inevitable together—still, no doubt, pissed off at each other, but each glad enough for the other’s company to be honest with each other. And in fact, this exchange shows that underneath all the skeptic/believer sparring, they both actually share the same feelings about the paranormal. Neither the agnostic ‘believer’ in the paranormal nor the suddenly Catholic ‘skeptic’ really knows what’s going to happen next—despite the fact that they would seem to have been given rather lethal proof of a life beyond this one—and neither is ready to confront death or to become part of the otherworld.

The late-night visit to Mulder’s apartment is necessary, and so satisfying; but in a way all it does is ratify in the real world that life-changing, or at least relationship-changing, moment in the hallway. Maybe they’re not a romance. But they are, now, connected in a way that despite everything they weren’t before. As JKR observes after Hermione, Ron, and Harry knock a troll senseless in  _Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,_ some experiences you just can't share without being bonded by them, and this evidently is one of them.

So in the end, I guess I have to say I’m glad “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas” was made. In TV, as in Christmas and life in general, you have to take the crap with the good. And we are heading into a string of pretty bad episodes; so I have to conclude by thanking Chris Carter for the Christmas present. There's sooooo much awful coming up.


End file.
